retrieving "grandchild" data

rubyonrails-talk
1

This is a classic example of why :through was added to has_many in 1.1 - see the excellent tutorials at:

http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/articles/2006/02/28/association-goodness http://blog.hasmanythrough.com/articles/2006/03/01/association-goodness-2

Essentially, you add an additional declaration to Library: has_many :books, :through => :shelves

And then you can say

@books = @library.books

and everything should work normally.

Not sure about the next level (library->shelf->book->page) - any hm:t experts want to offer some advice?

2

Max hit the fastest solution on it with find() and :include, but at the end of the day, these are all Ruby enumerables, so you can fall back onto Ruby operators (albeit at the cost of more SQL queries):

@pages = library.shelves.map { |s| s.books.map { |b| b.pages } } }.flatten

Matt Jones wrote: